Agentic marketing is gaining momentum, with 31% of consumers saying AI assistants increase brand loyalty and 33% trusting AI to shop for them.
Indianapolis, US, September 29, 2026 – SAP today announced it has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic Marketing for B2C Enterprises 2026 Vendor Assessment (doc # US54113426, September 2026).
SAP’s research indicates consumers are increasingly delegating buying journeys to AI that can not only recommend but also act. The 2026 Global Customer Loyalty Index found that 33% of consumers now trust AI assistants to complete purchases on their behalf. A further 31% of consumers say interactions with AI assistants make them more loyal to a brand, indicating that well-designed AI experiences can strengthen customer relationships as well as streamline the path to purchase.
As businesses look for new ways to engage customers, many are turning to agentic marketing to deliver more relevant, seamless experiences. SAP believes the IDC MarketScape recognition underscores its vision for Autonomous CX, where AI connects, automates and executes customer engagement across marketing, sales, commerce and service. To us, it reflects SAP’s commitment to helping enterprises deliver intelligent, personalized customer experiences, enhanced by AI, built on trusted data, connected business processes and grounded in real-life business context. Together, these capabilities can orchestrate workflows across the business, not just execute individual tasks, connecting decisions, actions and outcomes in ways that would be difficult to manage manually at scale.
“We’re proud to be named a Leader in this IDC MarketScape Report,” said Sara Richter, Chief Marketing Officer, SAP Engagement Cloud. “Marketers today are under growing pressure to manage complex customer journeys while building trust and driving growth. They want the benefits of AI without adding more complexity to their technology landscape. SAP Engagement Cloud helps make that possible by embedding AI across the entire customer engagement lifecycle. With trusted business context and connected workflows, AI can do more than recommend the next best action, it can help orchestrate the work required to act on it, connecting decisions, actions and outcomes across the business. Brands can move beyond basic automation and create connected, intelligent experiences that feel relevant and trustworthy at every stage.”
SAP Engagement Cloud customers are already using SAP’s AI capabilities to transform their customer engagement:
- Consumer products business EcoFlow automated customer journeys with AI to replace mass email marketing with highly personalised, relevant communications at scale resulting in a 48% growth in active customers.
- Guitar brand Gibson: AI-driven personalized customer journeys orchestrated across channels resulted in 10% of total revenue driven by intelligent automation in one year.
- Ice hockey team Adler Mannheim implemented an AI-fueled data foundation to drive fan loyalty, increasing subscriptions by 50% and boosting pre-game fan engagement by 80%.
The IDC MarketScape recognized SAP for the following strengths:
- With Joule’s agentic layer, marketers get real-time, context-aware personalization without having to reconcile SAP and non-SAP data themselves, since Joule Agents and Assistants draw on a harmonized SAP Business Data Cloud foundation. Teams receive role-based guidance for navigating complex workflows across Autonomous Domains, while everyday tasks such as retrieving information, connecting enterprise data, and completing multistep processes happen independently, freeing staff from manual execution. In Engagement Cloud, this means personalization and segmentation scale on their own, and the 4Q25 CX release lets customer service issues resolve autonomously, backed by SAP’s enterprise data layer and Knowledge Graph, instead of requiring escalation.
- Because Joule Studio is low code, organizations with reasonable levels of in-house development capabilities can build custom agents themselves, without waiting on IT or writing code, while still connecting to Joule, SAP CX, and third-party systems grounded in the SAP Knowledge Graph and Business Data Cloud. For sales and marketing teams, this means faster deal cycles and higher conversion: a sales-assistant agent, for example, automatically surfaces buying patterns and product recommendations from purchase history, sparing reps the manual analysis.
- Marketers running campaigns across email, digital ads, wallet, conversational, and web can manage them all from a single platform instead of stitching together point solutions. Because Engagement Events connects external data sources into real-time segmentation, campaigns stay relevant as customer behavior shifts. AI-assisted tools such as natural-language product search, AI-generated consumption summaries, and an AI-assisted report builder cut down the manual work of building segments and reporting, enabling marketers to focus on strategy while AI handles recommendations, translation, prediction, and reporting at scale.
IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of technology and service suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the circles. Vendor year-over-year growth rate relative to the given market is indicated by a plus, neutral or minus next to the vendor name.]
Download the excerpt at https://www.sap.com/products/crm/engagement-cloud.html
